The Blessed Eucharist is the Sacrament. Baptism exists for
it, all the others are enriched by it. The whole being is nourished by it. It is
precisely food, which explains why it is the one sacrament meant to be received
daily. Without it, one petition in the Our Father—"Give us this
day our daily bread"—lacks the fullness of its meaning.

Early in his ministry, as St. John tells us (ch 6), Our Lord gave the first
promise of it. He had just worked what is probably the most famous of his
miracles, the feeding of the five thousand. The next day, in the synagogue at
Capernaum on the shore of the sea of Galilee, Our Lord made a speech which
should be read and reread. Here we quote a few phrases: "I am the Bread of
Life"; "I am the Living Bread, which came down from heaven. If any man
eat of this bread, he shall live forever: and the bread that I will give, is my
flesh for the life of the world"; "He that eats my flesh, and drinks
my blood, has everlasting life: and I will raise him up in the last day. For my
flesh is meat indeed: and my blood is drink indeed. He that eats my flesh, and
drinks my blood, abides in me, and I in him"; "He that eats me shall
live by me."

He saw that many of his own disciples were horrified at what he was saying.
He went on: "It is the spirit that quickens: the flesh profits
nothing." We know what he meant: in saying they must eat his flesh, he did
not mean dead flesh but his body with the life in it, with the living soul in
it. In some way he himself, living, was to be the food of their soul's life.
Needless to say, all this meant nothing whatever to those who heard it first.
For many, it was the end of discipleship. They simply left him, probably
thinking that for a man to talk of giving them his flesh to eat was mere
insanity. When he asked the Apostles if they would go too, Peter gave him one of
the most moving answers in all man's history: "Lord, to whom shall we
go?" He had not the faintest idea of what it all meant; but he had a total
belief in the Master he had chosen and simply hoped that some day it would be
made plain.

There is no hint that Our Lord ever raised the matter again until the Last
Supper. Then his meaning was most marvelously made plain. What he said and did
then is told us by Matthew, Mark, and Luke; and St. Paul tells it to the
Corinthians (1 Cor 10 and 11). St. John, who gives the longest account of the
Last Supper, does not mention the institution of the Blessed Eucharist; his
Gospel was written perhaps thirty years after the others, to be read in a church
which had been receiving Our Lord's body and blood for some sixty years. What he
had provided is the account we have just been considering of Our Lord's first
promise.

Here is St. Matthew's account of the establishment: "Jesus took bread,
and blessed, and broke: and gave to his disciples, and said, Take ye and eat:
This is my body. And taking the chalice he gave thanks: and gave to them,
saying: Drink ye all of this. For this is my blood of the New Testament, which
shall be shed for many unto remission of sins."

Since they deal with the food of our life, we must examine these words
closely. What we are about to say of "This is my body" will do for
"This is my blood" too. The word is need not detain us. There are
those, bent upon escaping the plain meaning of the words used, who say that the
phrase really means "This represents my body." It sounds very close to
desperation! No competent speaker would ever talk like that, least of all Our
Lord, least of all then;. The word this;, deserves a closer look.
Had he said, "Here is my body," he might have meant that, in some
mysterious way, his body was there as well as, along with, the bread which seems
so plainly to be there. But he said, "This is my body"—this
which I am holding, this which looks like bread but is not, this which was bread
before I blessed it, this is now my body. Similarly this, which was wine, which
still looks like wine, is not wine. It is now my blood.

Every life is nourished by its own kind—the body by material food, the
intellect by mental food. But the life we are now concerned with is Christ
living in us; the only possible food for it is Christ. So much is this so that
in our own day you will scarcely find grace held to be Christ's life in us
unless the Eucharist is held to be Christ himself.

What Our Lord was giving us was a union with himself closer than the Apostles
had in the three years of their companionship, than Mary Magdalen had when she
clung to him after his Resurrection. Two of St. Paul's phrases, from 1
Corinthians 11 and 10, are specially worth noting:

"Whosoever shall eat this bread, or drink the chalice of the Lord
unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and of the blood of the Lord"; and
"We, being many, are one bread, one body, all that partake of one
bread"—a reminder that the Eucharist is not only for each man's soul but
for the unity of the Mystical Body.

I can see why a Christian might be unable to bring himself to believe it,
finding it beyond his power to accept the idea that a man can give us his flesh
to eat. But why should anyone want to escape the plain meaning of the
words?

For the Catholic nothing could be simpler. Whether he understands or not, he
feels safe with Peter in the assurance that he who said he would give us his
body to eat had the words of eternal life. Return again to what he said. The
bread is not changed into the whole Christ, but into his body; the wine is not
changed into the whole Christ, but into his blood. But Christ lives, death has
no more dominion over him. The bread becomes his body, but where his body is,
there he is; the wine becomes his blood but is not thereby separated from his
body, for that would mean death; where his blood is, he is. Where either body or
blood is, there is Christ, body and blood, soul and divinity. That is the
doctrine of the Real Presence.

Transubstantiation

Besides the Real Presence which faith accepts and delights in, there is the
doctrine of transubstantiation, from which we may at least get a glimpse of what
happens when the priest consecrates bread and wine, so that they become Christ's
body and Christ's blood.

At this stage, we must be content with only the simplest statement of the
meaning of, and distinction between substance and accidents, without which we
should make nothing at all of transubstantiation. We shall concentrate upon
bread, reminding ourselves once again that what is said applies in principle to
wine as well.

We look at the bread the priest uses in the Sacrament. It is white, round,
soft. The whiteness is not the bread, it is simply a quality that the bread has
the same is true of the roundness and the softness. There is something there
that has these and other properties, qualities, attributes—the philosophers
call all of them accidents. Whiteness and roundness we see softness brings in
the sense of touch. We might smell bread, and the smell of new bread is
wonderful, but once again the smell is not the bread, but simply a property. The
something which has the whiteness, the softness, the roundness, has the smell
and if we try another sense, the sense of taste, the same something has that
special effect upon our palate.

In other words, whatever the senses perceive—even with the aid of those
instruments men are forever inventing to increase the reach of the senses—is
always of this same sort, a quality, a property, an attribute no sense
perceives the something which has all these qualities, which is the thing
itself. This something is what the philosophers call substance the rest are
accidents which it possesses. Our senses perceive accidents; only the mind knows
the substance. This is true of bread, it is true of every created thing. Left to
itself, the mind assumes that the substance is that which, in all its past
experience, has been found to have that particular group of accidents. But in
these two instances, the bread and wine of the Eucharist, the mind is not left
to itself. By the revelation of Christ it knows that the substance has been
changed, in the one case into the substance of his body, in the other into the
substance of his blood.

The senses can no more perceive the new substance resulting from the
consecration than they could have perceived the substance there before. We
cannot repeat too often that senses can perceive only accidents, and
consecration changes only the substance. The accidents remain in their totality—for
example, that which was wine and is now Christ's blood still has the smell of
wine, the intoxicating power of wine. One is occasionally startled to find some
scientist claiming to have put all the resources of his laboratory into testing
the consecrated bread; he announces triumphantly that there is no change
whatever, no difference between this and any other bread. We could have told him
that, without the aid of any instrument. For all that instruments can do is to
make contact with the accidents, and it is part of the doctrine of
transubstantiation that the accidents undergo no change whatever. If our
scientist had announced that he had found a change, that would be really
startling and upsetting.

The accidents, then, remain; but not, of course, as accidents of Christ's
body. It is not his body which has the whiteness and the roundness and the
softness. The accidents once held in existence by the substance of bread, and
those others once held in existence by the substance of wine, are now held in
existence solely by God's will to maintain them.

What of Christ's body, now sacramentally present? We must leave the
philosophy of this for a later stage in our study. All we shall say here is that
his body is wholly present, though not (so St. Thomas among others tells us)
extended in space. One further element in the doctrine of the Real Presence
needs to be stated: Christ's body remains in the communicant as long as the
accidents remain themselves. Where, in the normal action of our bodily
processes, they are so changed as to be no longer accidents of bread or
accidents of wine, the Real Presence in us of Christ's own individual body
ceases. But we live on in his Mystical Body.

This very sketchy outline of the doctrine of transubstantiation is almost
pathetic. But like so much in this book, what is here is only a beginning; you
have the rest of life before you.

The Sacrifice of the Mass

Upon Calvary Christ Our Lord offered himself in sacrifice for the redemption
of the human race. There had been sacrifices before Calvary, myriads of them—foreshadowings,
figures, distortions often enough, but reaching out strongly or feebly towards
the perfection of Calvary's sacrifice.

These represented an awareness in men, a sort of instinct, that they must
from time to time take something out of that vast store of things God has given
them and give it back to him. Men might have used the thing for themselves but
chose not to; they offered it to God, made it sacred (that is what the word
sacrifice means). In itself, sacrifice is simply the admission that all
things are God's; even in a sinless world this would be true, and men would want
to utter the trust by sacrifice. With sin, there was a new element; sacrifice
would include the destruction of the thing offered—an animal, usually.

We can study these sacrifices, as they were before Calvary at once perfected
and ended them, in the Temple sacrifices of the Jews, the Chosen People. The
whole air of the Old Testament is heavy with the odor of animals slain and
offered to God. The slaying and the offering—immolation and oblation—were
both necessary elements. But whereas the offering was always made by the
priests, the slaying need not be done by them; often it was the work of the
Temple servants. For it was not the slaying that made the object sacred, but the
offering. The essential thing was that the priest offer a living thing slain.

With Christ, we have said, sacrifice came to its perfection. The priest was
perfect, for Christ was the priest. The victim was perfect, for he was the
victim too. He offered himself, slain. But not slain by himself. He was slain by
others, slain indeed by his enemies.

What he did was complete, once for all, not to be repeated. It accomplished
three things principally—atoned for the sin of the race, healed the breach
between the race and God, opened heaven to man, opened it never to be closed.
His is "the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but for those
of the whole world" (1 Jn 2:1).

With such completion, what was still to be done? For something was
still to be done. Christ is still in action on men's behalf, as the Epistle to
the Hebrews tells us. Jesus has entered "into heaven itself, that he may
appear now, in the presence of God for us" (9:24). He is
"always living to make intercession for us" (7:25). What still remains
to be done is not an addition to what was done on Calvary, but its application
to each man—that each of us should receive for himself what Our Lord won for
our race.

The "intercession" just spoken of is not a new sacrifice but the
showing to God of the sacrifice of Calvary. The Victim, once slain, now
deathless, stands before God, with the marks of the slaying still upon him—"a
Lamb standing, as it were slain" (Rv 5:6).

We are now in a better position to understand the Sacrifice of the Mass. In
heaving Christ is presenting himself, once slain upon Calvary, to his heavenly
Father. On earth the priest—by Christ's command, in Christ's name, by Christ's
power—is offering to God the Victim once slain upon Calvary. Nor does this
mean a new sacrifice, but Calvary's sacrifice presented anew—in order that the
redemption won for our race should produce its fruit in us individually.

In the Mass the priest consecrates bread and wine, so that they become
Christ's body and blood. Thus the Christ he offers is truly there really there.
The Church sees the separate consecration as belonging to the very essence of
the Mass. It is a remainder of Christ's death—and he had told his first
priests at the Last Supper that, in doing what he had just done, "they
should show forth the death of the Lord, until he come (1 Cor 11:26). They
should show forth Christ's death, remind us of his death, not, of
course, kill him, any more than he had killed himself on Calvary.

The priest offers the sacrifice. But we are, in our lesser way, offerers too.
Twice we are told so in the Ordinary of the Mass. We have already seen how after
the Consecration the priest says, "We thy servants but also thy holy people
[plebs tua sancta] . . . offer . . . a pure, holy and immaculate
Victim." To see ourselves merely as spectators at Mass is to miss the
opportunity to take our part in the highest action done upon earth.

One element in the Mass remains to be mentioned. We, united with Christ's
priests, have offered Our Lord to God. And God gives him back to us, to be the
Life of our life. That is what Holy Communion means. God, while retaining Christ
for his own, also shares him with us. So that God and man, each in his own way,
receive the slain and risen God-man.